The abstractions of modernity

In her dissertation Women’s Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in Africa. Mixed Norms and Identities in Infertility Management in Zimbabwe (1999), professor of women’s law, Anne Hellum, singles out three approaches to human rights law. In addition to the “universalist”

and the “culture-relativist” approach, there is the so-called “pluralist” approach that she herself uses in her study “of how people manage their procreative problems in Zimbabwe”

(op.cit.: 411).

The universalist approach is represented by “the liberal political and philosophical discussion about women’s rights and human rights” that focuses on “the apparent incommensurability of individual rights and collective rights”, for example in African women’s “identities as members of an extended family network” typically regarded as “a major obstacle to the implementation of women’s human rights” (ibid.). This is the approach of the United Nations Women’s Convention, where “a hierarchy of values which sets women’s individual rights up against the rights of the group”, has been established (ibid.). The approach is, Hellum argues, premised on a mixture of “modernization theory“, “liberal Western feminist jurisprudence”

and the “centralist legal theory which is the dominant doctrinal position in Western legal science” (op.cit.: 413, 414). Modernization theory, like “Rostow’s liberal political and economic theory”, assumes that it is “the traditional customs and practices” that are “the major barrier to economic development” (op.cit.: 413). Development is considered “an imitative process”, during which the less developed countries gradually assume the qualities of more developed Western countries (op.cit.: 414).⁴³⁰ The proponents of “modernization”

claim, falsely in Hellum’s opinion, that “international human rights like gender equality,

428 Widding Isaksen, for example, criticizes philosophy and sociology in general for their suppression of the body, nature and passions, i.e. all that is associated with the feminine. This goes for the thinking of modernity, as defined here, but also for canonical figures in the history of philosophy, such as Descartes and Plato, and the sociological classics, Karl Marx, Emile Durkeheim and Max Weber.

429 Consider for example the contributions of Karin Widerberg and Hanne Haavind.

430 Ester Boserup had criticized “the inherent gender bias of international law and development policies”, and pointed out “the need for an international and national legal framework that would combat the differential treatment of women and men in the Third World” (Hellum 1999: 413). Boserup’s criticism, however, Hellum notes, left the notion of development as “an imitative process” essentially untouced (op.cit.: 414).

determination and freedom are and must be the same everywhere, […] regardless of time and space” (ibid.). This is also how “the problem of difference” is typically dealt with in Western

“centralist legal theory”: “The problem of difference is resolved on the basis of the idea of the existence of overriding norms and values; […] coherence and harmony between different norms and values is ensured through the establishment of a hierarchy of values and sources”, of the same kind in all contexts: It is a position that is interested in “the similarities between human beings, groups and situations, regardless of their different social and cultural contexts”

(ibid.). A strategy of “same” treatment is also prescribed by liberal feminists: “Liberal feminists have worked to reform the law and to remove legal barriers to women being treated the same as men in the public and private sphere” (op.cit.: 412). They have however, correctly according to Hellum, been criticized “by a difference-oriented Western feminist jurisprudence” that emphasizes “the male bias […] inherent in the gender neutral equal status discourse”,⁴³¹ and by “American, African and Asian feminists” who have shown how liberal feminism “assumes a privileged ethnocentric universality” (ibid.).

However, she goes on, the universalist approach should not be replaced by the relativist approach:

[…] the culture-relativist approach regards different value systems as unique and incompatible units. Culture relativists deny that conflicts between values from different traditions can be settled in any reasonable way. What is reasonable is itself a product of particular cultures and societies. Overriding standards for the resolution of value conflicts do not exist (op.cit.: 418).

The problem with such an approach, according to Hellum, is that it excludes the possibility of

“dialogue and change” (ibid.). On the one hand, her study of the management of procreative problems in Zimbabwe shows the limits of the universalist approach:

On the basis of the data collected for the purpose of this study it can be assumed that the beneficiaries of the modern family law that embody equal access to procreative measures in marriage and equal rights upon divorce are the Christian, urban, aged and middle-class women (op.cit.: 415).

The “large groups of childless women” resort, however, to “procreative remedies that are embodied in extended family relationships” (op.cit.: 415). For these groups of women it

431 Hellum relies in this connection on the ‘difference-oriented’ perspective developed by the pioneer in Norwegian women’s law, Tove Stang Dahl.

would be better to rely on “family-based and gender-specific solutions to procreative problems” (op.cit.: 417): “[…] the mechanical adoption of international human rights principles in general, and the non-discrimination principle in particular”, contribute to

“uprooting” these solutions, and might “excerbate rather than alleviate their [the women’s]

problems” (ibid.).⁴³² On the other hand, however, the relativist approach is equally inadequate, as it tends “to see international human rights law and African customs and practices as essentially separate and incompatible systems of norms”, when in fact, if we study how “families, chiefs, healers and community courts” interpret customs as well as human rights based legislation, the significant point is “how the different norms and values are merged in ways which lead to more situationally based outcomes for the parties” (op.cit.:

419-420). Thus, we have, Hellum argues, “a situation where a wide range of international and legislated norms are merged with local norms, perceptions and values in complex chains of human relationships”, in other words, “as demonstrated by this study, a basis for dialogue and change” (op.cit.: 420). This is precisely the situation that is captured by the third “pluralist, processual and contextual” approach (op.cit.: 421):

In an attempt to reconcile conflicting human rights values like gender equality and cultural diversity in a dynamic, flexible and situation-sensitive manner, the emerging pluralist alternative is trying to define a space between universalism and relativism […].[…] it offers an in between solution, and places conflicting values within a cultural context while simultaneously giving rise for dialogue and change. Pluralists recognize the existence of primary values. They accept that conflicts among primary values can be resolved by appealing to some reasonable ranking of the values in question. As regards conflicts between human rights values like gender equality and the protection of culture and custom the answer lies in analyzing the conflicting values in the social and cultural context in which the individuals concerned live and act (ibid.).

432 This might also be recommendable in other parts of the world: “In all parts of the world we are witnessing the erosion of human relationships through excessive focus upon the individual. The fact that women’s quest for dignity and protection comes into conflict with the conceptualization of the spouses as two free and autonomous individuals is not an exotic African phenomenon. For example, whether the mutual obligation to support each other in the marriage is compatible with the principle of gender equality has been the subject of intense discussion in connection with the ongoing reform of the Scandinavian marriage laws” (Hellum 1999: 415-416).

In this connection Hellum draws also on works by the influential Norwegian sociologist of law, Vilhelm Aubert, and by Scandinavian women’s law scholars, such as Tone Sverdrup and Kirsten Ketcher in addition to Stang Dahl. In Aubert’s view “the fragmentation of Family Law into Women’s Law and Children’s Law in Norway shows how the family has been undermined as a basic social and legal institution. In Aubert’s view, unless the underlying socio-economic trends are reversed, it is improbable that the unfortunate side-effects of the rights-oriented individualism that characterizes the present legal situation can be reversed by legislation or court practice” (op.cit.: 415). The women’s law scholars emphasize “the need of a legal framework that transgresses the dichotomous divisions between women as individually waged workers and women as family caretakers”

(ibid.).

This implies, Hellum says, a “grounded theory” perspective combined with “the methodological perspective of taking women as the starting point”;⁴³³ “theoretical generalization” about “how individual justice is achieved by specific groups of women in specific situations and contexts” is constantly connected to “empirical knowledge about women’s lived experiences and local practices and procedures” (op.cit.: 32).

In Hellum’s argument there are several stages that deserve closer consideration. In this connection I want to focus on two related claims – that modern thought about what is right and just is too abstract, and that its prescriptions for justice therefore need to be corrected by empirical knowledge about the concrete cases in which the prescriptions are to be applied.

These two claims occur, together, in several of the contributions. Elaborations similar to Hellum’s can be found in contributions which discuss the justification and implementation of rights in non-Western cultures as well as in increasingly multi-ethnic Western societies.⁴³⁴ Professor in sociology, Kari Wærness (1995), discusses a different problem, relying however on a similar argument. She criticizes what she, along with Susan Bordo,⁴³⁵ regards as “a race for theory” in contemporary academic gender studies: “We need to consider the degree to which this serves not the empowerment of diverse cultural voices and styles, but the academic hegemony of metatheoretical discourse” (op.cit.: 21), she says. Feminists should concentrate less on elaborating, defending and dissecting abstract notions and standards, and more on doing concrete empirical research and “middle-range”-theorizing⁴³⁶ (op.cit.: 20). Normative problems should be dealt with and resolved as they occur in ongoing research:

Using sociological imagination and methods, concepts and theoretical approaches that we are already familiar with, focusing on what could be important from the perspective of women’s politics and result in social criticism, those of us doing women’s studies have several tasks ahead of us. We need […] relevant knowledge about […] the increased significance of the market economy, the crisis of the welfare state, the increasing unemployment and the developments in biotechnology […]. For me this kind of research into […] ordinary women’s lives […] is the main answer to the postmodern challenge […], because there is less risk of generalizing in the way postmodernists are warning us about, […] avoiding internal-theoretical discourse (op.cit.: 22).

433 In addition to Stang Dahl, Hellum’s theoretical source of inspiration on this point, is Ulrike Prokop’s critique of a “public equality policy […] becoming increasingly detached from the female lifeworld” (Hellum 1999:

417).

434 Cf. Bredal (1994), Haugestad (1995), Borchgrevink (2002), Jacobsen and Gressgård (2002), Thorbjørnsrud (2003).

435 She refers to Bordo’s article “Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender-Sceptisism”.

436 She refers to Robert Merton.

This parallels Hellum’s approach: Relativist and postmodernist critique of “the great narratives” target the abstract moral principles defended in the thinking of modernity (ibid.), but not the context-sensitive, empirically well-grounded approach to normative problems Hellum and Wærness defend.⁴³⁷ An example of this move from a different context is professor in philosophy Vigdis Songe-Møller’s (2000/2001) discussion of the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and Toril Moi, one of Beauvoir’s present-day interpreters. This is a feminism, Songe-Møller argues, concerned with “the opposition between freedom on the one hand and alienation and oppression on the other” when asking what it is to be a woman, to be embodied as a woman, to be in a woman’s “situation”⁴³⁸ (op.cit.: 231). However, freedom, alienation and oppression should not be reduced to topics of abstract academic debate:⁴³⁹

“Only the study of concrete situations, of concrete experiences of what it is to be a woman, can give an answer to the question [what is a woman]. And the answer will never contain any universal, or normative, definition of woman” – of what it is to be free, alienated or oppressed in a woman’s situation – “but will always be connected to given, social contexts” (ibid.).

Yet another, still different, example is Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen and Monica Rudberg’s analysis of the interconnections between the normative horizon of the modern imaginary and the particular “experience of modernity” from a “male, middle-class perspective” (1994: 50).

Their presupposition is that “universal morality” might be transformed if women’s experiences and moral orientations were to be included in the picture, in ways, however, that are not easily grasped:

In the last phase of modernity we see several contradictory signs […]. On the one hand, the tendency for both traditional female responsibility (towards the family) and traditional male responsibility (towards society) is in the process of disappearing. On the other hand, there is the tendency for the morality of care to make an advance into public life and for universal morality to enter family life. We do not know if the result will be that men and women will develop though integrating the weakly developed side (women’s care values will become universal/public, men’s autonomy will provide a breath of fresh air in family relations) or whether we are moving towards a fin-de-siècle society of self-centered aesthetes in which both men and women have their gender-specific life-styleprojects (ibid.).

437 For reflections similar to Wærness’ on this point, see Kaul (1998), Sørensen (1999), Ve (1999a), Syltevik (2000).

438 “In line with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty she [Beauvoir] talks about the body as situation” (original emphasis, Songe-Møller 2000/2001: 230-231).

439 She refers to Moi’s criticism of “the theoretical machinery” and “the fantastic level of abstraction” in contemporary feminist theory (Songe-Møller 2000/2001: 230).

Finally, in a study inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of discourses (discourses that

“constitute truth and reality”) and Bruno Latour’s analysis of “science in action”, philosopher Cathrine Egeland traces the “conditions of production” of the norm of “gender equality”

(2001: 53, 56, 58, ). Criteria of what is true, real, right and scientific are, she argues, often presented as universal, beyond “culture”, when they are in fact cultural “products” of particular “discourses” in “action”, constituted by the modern “culture of no culture” (op.cit.:

57). The norm of gender equality is, in her view, a special case of this general pattern. The feminist defenders of modernity present gender equality as universal, objective and impartial, when it is in fact a normative product of certain discursive “conditions”, and more specifically, of what is allowed for within “the frame of phallogocentrism”.⁴⁴⁰ Instead of maintaining and defending abstract norms of this sort – which is to defend an illusion, as they are all culturally embedded – feminists should focus on clarifying their genealogy, their embeddedness in complexes of “power/knowledge” (op.cit.: 66), and on “limited destabilizing interventions in the practices establishing and regulating gender identity” (op.cit.: 64), as prescribed by among others Judith Butler.⁴⁴¹ Again, what is recommended, is to correct, even replace, the abstract morality of modernity with concrete political interventions and context-sensitive studies of what is actually going on in social life.⁴⁴²

Thus, we see a critique of modern abstractness in very different contributions; in Wærness’

defense of a kind of problem-oriented empiricism from ‘the perspective of women’s politics’, but also in Egeland’s deconstructive but normative endeavor, that of “undermining the hegemonic gender norms” (op.cit.: 63). Generally speaking, the critique is common, even common-sense: Most contributors accept that the modern view is too abstract. Fewer elaborate on what exactly is abstracted away, and why, more specifically, abstraction generally, and the abstractions of the modern view in particular, are indefensible.

Some, however, articulate elaborated dissent. In a discussion of gender in economics, Kristin Dale argues that several of the “assumptions” made in influential economic theories, as well as the “use” of such theories can be criticized from a feminist perspective (1992: 248).⁴⁴³

440 She refers to the works of Luce Irigaray.

441 In her book Gender Trouble.

442 In Egeland’s case, what are recommended, however, are not simply empirical studies: Neither Irigaray’s notion of phallogocentrism nor Foucault’s notion of discourse are meant as simple empirical notions. This also goes for Songe-Møller/Moi/Beauvoir’s notion of ‘women’s situation’ (see 5.4.14).

443 She refers to Vilfred Pareto, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Kenneth J.

Arrow and John Roemer as the central figures in the development of theory and philosophy in economics in the

However, these theories should not be dismissed simply because they are abstract,

“deductive” and “axiomatic” (op.cit.: 247). On the contrary, feminists can use such theories for their own analytical purposes, for example when they study how different goods are distributed between women and men, if the assumptions are rearticulated.⁴⁴⁴ Jorun Solheim’s points out that “generalization and abstraction” are fundamental in all “human thinking”, also in “thinking” from a feminist perspective (1999: 86). Thus, she urges feminists not to dismiss the abstract “logic of equality” on which the “universal criteria“ of the “ethics of rights” is based, simply because it is abstract:

The fundamental quality of equality is to be an abstraction from the embodied and concrete.

To equate something with something else implies to put aside substantial, physical qualities and distinctions – the concrete appearance of things. This does not mean that these qualities and distinctions disappear, the concrete […] is suspended to introduce a new level of meaning – a meta-level where equality is established exactly ‘in abstracto’. […] In much of contemporary feminist/postmodern debate this point seems to be missed – equality vs.

difference is elaborated as a flat opposition on the same level. This creates a pretty strange discussion, where what is forgotten is that generalization and abstraction are fundamental aspects of all human thinking. […]. Equality […] implies in other words a shift in the level of meaning through meta-communication, a re-presentation of the concrete in an ideal form or abstract category. […] Equality is an ideal unit – a regulative idea if you want – it does not

‘correspond’ to anything of substance in the world (original emphasis, 1999: 85-86).

Thus, a few commentators, such as Dale and Solheim, counter the feminist main-stream, and defend explicitly the abstractions of modernity. In addition, there are commentators who defend different abstract moves in other connections. One example is the critical article on Karin Widerberg’s Kunnskapens kjønn⁴⁴⁵ in which Hanne Davidsen, Susanna M. Solli and Elisabeth Waaler defend a feminist sociology that eschews naive “phenomenological”

theorizing based on women’s everyday experiences: There are no everyday experiences shared by all women, and experiences occur never “in natura”; they cannot be “described without being interpreted”, they argue (1996: 100). Instead, “theoretical sociology needs to abstract the social forms⁴⁴⁶ of interchange and tension” between individual and society, to facilitate “epistemological breaks”⁴⁴⁷ with the notions and knowledge of “the lifeworld”

(op.cit.: 109). Another example is sociologist Hildur Ve who reacts to “postmodernists” who

twentieth-century, whereas Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, T.R. Malthus, David Ricardo and Karl Marx are introduced as the founding fathers of the discipline.

444 For example “individuals” not “households” should be the unit in studies of distribution, or the welfare of women and children will be overlooked (Dale 1992: 250).

445 Widerberg’ book is introduced thoroughly in 5.4.5.

446 Referring to Georg Simmel’s notion of social forms.

447 Referring to Pierre Bourdieu.

deem “the idea of a universal female identity” as “essentialist” (1999a: 133). To give a definition of women’s situation and perspectives is not necessarily to claim anything about the

deem “the idea of a universal female identity” as “essentialist” (1999a: 133). To give a definition of women’s situation and perspectives is not necessarily to claim anything about the

In document Feminism, Epistemology & Morality (sider 178-186)